On the Genealogy of Midnight in Paris

Verónica Sofía Collins Tapia On the Genealogy of Midnight in Paris “Nostalgia is denial, denial of the painful present”, claims Paul, the very hated antagonist in Woody Allen’s 2011 film, Midnight in Paris. The french 20th-century philosopher and historian Michel Foucault would very probably agree with Paul in that he is not wrong in thinking that nostalgia is denial, since, in many cases, it can be. Nevertheless, he is wrong in thinking that nostalgia is completely useless, Foucault would say. Both Allen with Midnight in Paris and Foucault with his work as a genealogist try to challenge our perception of history and invite us to use it as a tool not only helpful to revisit the past but also valuable for transforming our present. Gil Pender and his “Golden Age Thinking” For the beginning of the film, Woody Allen shows us a total of 60 beautiful shots of the city that transition from day to night with the french classic Si Tu Vois Ma Mere as background music, depicting a sense of the typical romantic nostalgia that is often associated with Paris. While the audience is still hooked by the allure of this opening scene, Gil, the protagonist, starts expressing his love for the city: “Can you picture how drop dead gorgeous this city is in the rain? Imagine this town in the 20’s. Paris in the 20’s in the rain. The artists and writers!”. His fiancée, Inés, is soon added to the conversation, breaking Gil’s and the audience’s romanticism back into reality. “What is so great about rain?” and “what is good about getting wet?”, she exclaims. Since this first scene, we get a grasp of the constant struggle between fantasy and reality that is portrayed throughout the film. Gil Pender, played by Owen Wilson, is an american screenwriter who visits Paris with his fiancée and her parents. As a creative, he finds himself in love with the culture and history of the city. His fiancée, however, does not. Both Inés and her parents are clearly more concerned in what they can buy and in their status. Gil often feels alienated by her repeatedly putting him down because of him wanting to be a novelist and his idealistic view of the past. He yearns for Paris in the 1920’s, when the Cultural Revolution led by writers and artists encouraged them to be free in expressing themselves (the so-called Lost Generation). He believes that this attitude towards art is now gone in today’s society. When he tells his wife’s friends that the main character of the novel he is writing works on a nostalgia shop, his arrogant arch-nemesis Paul defines nostalgia as “the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one’s living in.” This nostalgia is very often called “Golden Age Thinking”, which Gil is a perfect exemplar for. Paul continues to explain that “it is a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present”, following with the famous “nostalgia is denial, denial of the painful present”. One night when he is abandoned by his fiancée and her pseudo-intellectual friends, Gil is left alone to wander through the streets of Paris. That’s when at midnight, a car from the 1920’s picks him up and he finds himself in the time period of the Lost Generation. In his Golden Age era, he finally finds like-minded people with who he can engage in existential questions and artistic critiques. Surrounded by his literary heroes (Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Dalí, Picasso, Cole Porter, Luis Buñuel, and the like), he no longer feels alone in the world. He has found a community of others who need art as much as he does. Through his “travels” to the 1920’s, he comes to the realization that the reason why he feels alienated in the present isn’t because times have changed but because he was living surrounded by the shallow world of materialism, which only values surface-level concerns. At the end of the movie, he understands that all this time he was not necessarily looking for the past but for a deeper life in his present. At last, he seems to achieve what Gertrude Stein (the character) describes as the artist’s job, “not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence” When Gil finally breaks up with Inéz and goes walking once again along the streets of Paris, he bumps into Gabrielle, an antique dealer and fellow admirer of The Lost Generation that he met before in the film. He offers her to walk her home and, in contrast to his former fiancée, she doesn’t mind walking in the rain. Instead, just like him, she thinks Paris is the most beautiful in the rain. At the same time, Si Tu Vois ma Mere starts playing in the background just like in the opening scene. This reminds us of the time when Gil started traveling to the 1920’s as an escape of his shallow, materialistic life. This time, however, he has learned from the past and is ready to take a step ahead and go to the future. Foucault’s genealogy and history of the present Michel Foucault’s most important contribution is to the way we look at history. Even when his methodology in the discipline changed over time from archeology to genealogy, it is safe to say that his approach was never inside the mainstream. He challenged both continuous historical accounts (which emphasize how much things stay the same e.g. “every day, I am getting better and better”) and discontinuous ones (which emphasize how much things change e.g. “it is not possible to step into the same river twice”). His aim was never to be objective (like most traditional historians try to) but to give a critical analysis of the past. His first method, archeology, studies many different things that happened at the same time and tries to figure out how all of these make sense together. For example, Foucault may have wanted to know how linguistics, economics and science related to one another in the eighteenth-century in Europe. Unlike traditional history, it analyzes a variety of things in one time period instead of tracing the development of one thing over time. Foucault’s shift to his second method, genealogy, emerged when he came across with Friedrich Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations at the age of 27 on holiday in Italy. The book contains an essay called “On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life”, which served as a revelation for the young philosopher. The essay argued that academics had a wrong take on the way we should look at history. Their disinterested and objective view of using it merely as a way to learn how it all was in the past infuriated Nietzsche. He later developed what we know as “effective history”. Instead of reading history for history’s sake, Nietzsche aimed to dig out ideas from the past that can help us live a better life in our own times. Inspired by all of this, Foucault decided that he had to change his direction to start looking at the past departing from the point of view of the present, not the other way around. Accordingly, he developed his second method. Genealogy questions the things that are both considered in the present to be fantastic and way better than in the past and yet are, in some ways, problematic and/or incoherent (i.e. education, media, sexuality, etc.) by looking at the different ways those things were done back in time (a lot of times superior to how we do them now). It begins its analysis from a question posed in the present, using historical materials to rethink and revalue the current times. This is also what he called “history of the present”. As mentioned before, Foucault was not trying to be objective. He didn’t care about total historical accuracy. He was also not trying to get us nostalgic. Instead, he wanted us to pick up lessons from the past in order to improve our present. The focus and emphasis of his historical analysis was shaped by concerns about the present. He saw history as a repository of ideas that can help us look differently at the dominant ideologies and institutions of our times. He wrote history in order to help us gain surprising insights into our present circumstances. When the “Golden Age Thinking” becomes a loop Gil meets Adriana, an aspiring fashion designer, in a visit to Gertrude Stein’s studio. They both have an instant connection because of their fascination to the past. While Gil views Paris in the 1920’s (Adriana’s era) as his ideal cultural time, Adriana looks to the Belle Époque (the comfortable period preceding World War I) for artistic inspiration. They are both stuck on the idea of “being born too late”, of thinking that living in a former period would have been better than in their respective presents. When they are both looking at a turn-of-the-century carousel, Adriana proclaims that it is from her favorite era where “everything was so perfect”. Ironically, this is the same way Gil feels about the 20’s. They both seem to be oblivious to the fact that their Golden Eras had flaws on their own. In fact, we get to see in the film how Gil’s idealized time was in many ways far from perfect. About the 1920’s, Adriana says that “everything moves so fast and life is noisy and complicated”. It’s funny to think that in the eyes of a twenty-first century person like Gil, the 1920’s would even look calm and uncomplicated. While strolling through the streets of 1920’s Paris, Gil and Adriana encounter a carriage that transports them this time to her beloved Golden Age, the Belle Époque. They both go first to Maxim’s and then to the Moulin Rouge, where they meet three relevant painters of the time: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin and Edgar Degas. The artists claim that their generation “is empty and has no imagination”. Funnily enough, they think that it would have been better to live during the Renaissance (their own Golden Age). The painters invite Adriana to take a job as a designer for ballet costumes. She then tries to pursue Gil into staying with her in the Belle Époque and never go back to the 1920’s. She says that the Belle Époque is “the greatest, most beautiful era Paris has ever known”. When Gil, baffled, asks “what about the 20’s?”, she responds “well, it’s the present, it’s dull”. Consequently, Gil finds himself forced to explain Adriana that he dropped in the 1920’s from 2010 the same way they both did in the Belle Époque. He tells her that he “was trying to escape [his] present the same way [she] was trying to escape [hers], to a Golden Age”. Gil tells Adriana that if she stays in the Belle Époque and it becomes her present, pretty soon she will start imagining another time was really the Golden Time. “That’s what the present is. It’s a little unsatisfying because life is a little unsatisfying”, he tells her before going back one more time to the 1920’s. While trying to explain the “adventures” he’s been having every night in the city to his fiancée, Gil quotes William Faulkner (one of the writers he met in the 1920’s) by saying: “The past is not dead! Actually, it’s not even past”. This phrase fits perfectly with the powerful insights Gil finally gains by traveling to the Belle Époque with Adriana. He realizes that while he (as a twentieth-century individual) sees the Paris in the 1920’s as the city’s Golden Age, Adriana (from the 1920’s) views the Belle Époque as Paris’ Golden Age and the painters from the Belle Époque consider the Renaissance to be Paris’ true Golden Age. At last, he understands that the reason why we idealize the past in not because it was actually better than the present but rather because we are always longing for what we don’t have. In fact, there cannot possibly be a “real” Golden Age since every era considers a former one to be superior. This infinite loop of longing for the past shows that we will always find it intriguing precisely because we don’t get to experience it. Foucault’s remedy for the loop Not only does Inés as well as her parents and her friend/lover Paul look down on Gil’s “Golden Age Thinking” in Midnight in Paris but the “syndrome” is also very frequently laughed at and considered “delusional” in real life. Ironically, as we see on the film, it happens more often than not. It even seems to be a recurrent phenomenon throughout history. The movie’s message claiming that apparently our collective obsession with fixating on the past is and always will be a sort of repetitive loop feels particularly discouraging. The fact that it suggests that this happens because the present is at times inevitably unsatisfactory feels even sadder. Nevertheless, its main character manages to fall into the “Golden Age Thinking” trap, travel to the past not to only one era but two (one of them being none other than his beloved Golden Age), recognize that it is in fact a trap, come back to the present for good and, in the end, look forward to the future more hopeful than ever. So, is the movie implying that Inés’ and her parents’ as well as Paul’s (and many other people’s) skeptical approach to Gil’s nostalgia is wrong? Well, actually, very probably, it is. And Foucault would agree. Ultimately, Gil comes to understand that “Golden Age Thinking” exists not because the past was better but because we are dissatisfied with the present. He accomplishes to take the lessons he learned in his travels to the 1920’s, cherish the positive things they brought him and never look back. Gil’s journey from the past to the present (and lastly to the future) is a clear example of the idea that sometimes, to move forward, one ought to first look backwards. Foucault knew this all too well. The french philosopher would want us to learn from this film that, (unlike Gil at the beginning of the movie, Adriana and the painters from the Belle Epoque), we must learn to not dwell in traditional history. That is to say, we shouldn’t see history merely as a way of looking at how things were done in the past. We must not study history for history’s sake. It is exactly this approach to the past that leads us to look down on nostalgic people (or people trapped in “Golden Age Thinking”) precisely because it gives us no gains in the present. This method can make us feel like studying history is just a way of getting stuck in the past. Foucault would say that we must both not get nostalgic but also not reject the past entirely, either. In fact, he would argue that, just like Gil, it is a lot times crucial for us to look at history to understand our present and get hopeful about the future. But this is not possible if we keep studying the discipline in an objective, traditional manner. Focusing on solely getting the facts about the past “right” would not get us anywhere. Instead, if we want to do “effective history” just like Nietzsche and Foucault, we ought to look at the present before looking at the past. We must look for concerns in our present that we could find solutions (or at least insights) for in the past. Perhaps Gil didn’t do this consciously, but, it wasn’t until he found clarity about his present in his travels back in time that he realized there is no such thing as “a better era”. It was not until this time that he was able to move forward. Evidently, if he was a “realist” just like his fiancée and company, he would have never gained all this knowledge. Perhaps we must not reject “Golden Age Thinking” completely. As Foucault would say, there are a lot of things that were done superiorly in the past and, usually, we take this entirely for granted. Perhaps this is why we keep falling into the loop of idealizing former eras. However, “Golden Age Thinking” does not always have to be flawed. As Foucault would recognize, it can sometimes be hopeful. When it’s done properly, it strives for something better. Both the movie and Foucault’s work teach us that if we learn from the past, we can live in the present while still upholding a standard higher than what is required. Nowadays, the current rapid breakthrough in technology has made us disregard the value of the past more than ever. Our generation is clearly not concerned on looking back. We are completely driven to be always moving ahead. And, at the same time, we find ourselves romanticizing former eras more than frequently. We can even get obsessed with nostalgia. It is all around! We find it everywhere: tv shows, fashion, movies, books, advertisements, you name it!. There is a very evident irony in all of this. We have never been so eager to be progressive and been so haunted by the past simultaneously. Just like Gil, we find the present unsatisfactory maybe because, in many ways, life has become a little unsatisfactory. We have yet not found balance in between moving forward and looking back. It is necessary for us to stop trying to compensate the one with the other. It is not a matter of merely studying the past or stepping ahead. We must learn to not be so quick on dismissing the past or dwelling in it. Instead, we must take the good and use it to push ourselves into the future. We must learn to not only do history but instead “effective history”. Bibliography “What Is a ‘History of the Present’? On Foucault's Genealogies and Their Critical Preconditions.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1462474514541711. Woody Allen, director. Midnight in Paris. Hopscotch, 2011. Foucault, Michel, Michel Foucault, Michel Foucault, and Michel Foucault. The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Print. YouTube. (2018). PHILOSOPHY - Michel Foucault. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBJTeNTZtGU.